Wicked Problems: how to make contacting your doctor easy and fast
Technology is changing the way we interact with each other. Many processes and tasks that required a long time to do in the past are now a matter of clicking a button and voilá!
Unless you’re talking about public health. During many interviews we conducted, survey answers we read and interesting talks we had, we made clear that a lot of people even postpone or neglect to see a doctor at all, because of long waiting times, language barriers and a lack of direct feedback.
In addition to the survey we have also conducted interviews with 5 people. Our goal was to have a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to form a better picture of our user. Some of the interview questions included:
- Can you recall the last time you went to see your doctor? Please tell me about the general experience with your medical practice.
- What do you find important when choosing a medical practice/doctor?
- What is your experience with making an appointment with your doctor?
After receiving 32 responses from the surveys and conducting 5 interviews within one day we created an affinity map to visually cluster our findings. We used color coding to mark the topics, pain points and insights.
Main pain points
1️⃣ The time to get an appointment is too long.
2️⃣ Modifying an appointment is not easy.
3️⃣ Language barrier when calling the medical practice or using a local website.
4️⃣ Not all information about the doctors is available online.
Problem statement
Based on our research, we came to the following problem statement:
(Potential) patients need quick access to make or modify an appointment with a doctor and to receive health-related information online, because they are currently postponing or avoiding to see the doctor, are dealing with long waiting times, a language barrier and a lack of direct feedback.
First, to find out the current struggles and behavior of our user, we created an empathy map:
We found out our (potential) patients have a lot of what ifs, are too busy with life to make a phone call appointment, might be scared of a language barrier, and rely a lot on friends/family or (online) reviews.
Based on this empathy map, we came to our persona. Meet Anna 👋🏼
To find out the current struggles and behavior of Anna Fahey, we created an user journey map. What problems, motivations and actions does Anna go through in order to reach a goal? In this case: the goal of making an appointment with her doctor to see what she can do about her headache.
Lo-fis and prototyping
After a brainstorm, grouping all our thoughts, and finally some dot voting, we came to our first lo-fi’s. What features should our future make an appointment app need? What should come first? What makes a logical flow?
We combined the best features of our lo-fi wireframe sketches on paper, and designed a first design the final version on Figma.
Screen 1: Sign-in screen
Screen 2: The user has 3 options: to check their test results, ask for medication prescription and the most important — Book an appointment at the top. At the bottom there is a calendar icon where the scheduled appointments can be modified.
Screen 3: After clicking Book an appointment the user is presented with a list of doctors. Here they can see their languages spoken and the reviews. Also, “You visited this doctor last time” is added to help patients choose the doctor easier.
Screen 4: The user selects the doctor is then taken to their profile. After the user clicks on double appointment, the time slot this doctor is available for 30 min appointment is highlighted. All the information about the doctor himself is also accessible from this screen.
Screen 5: Then, the user chooses the time and is taken to the next screen with an option to be notified if earlier time becomes available. Also, they can choose if they wish to receive an email confirmation and to specify their symptoms for the doctor to be better informed at the time of the appointment.
Screen 6: Finally, after clicking Confirm this appointment, the patient is taken to the confirmation screen which includes all the appointment details.
As the final step of our case study we tested the prototype via Maze. Based on the direct success rate of 40% it seems that the usability of the design should be further improved to reach a higher percentage.
Key learnings
- Even though you fall into your own target group, you are not your user.
- Surveys and interviews are really necessary to design for the users and not for us
- It can be difficult to cross-reference all the data to define a problem where we can base our solution on
- Key learning: make quicker decisions. There are so many problems to solve, but we need to decide to go with only one and make the best decisions for that one
- Majority of the users currently do not have a digital system to get in touch with doctors at all
- People are impatient and don’t want to put in much effort: the struggle to make an appointment that suits well, sometimes leads to the decision to not make an appointment at all.
Next steps
- Analyse usability test results and iterate on the prototype
- Add a feature for different type of doctors and specialists
- Make it more accessible for people having difficulties reading/hearing
